


But I'm No Good at Words

by TheOceanIsMyInkwell



Category: Original Work
Genre: LGBTQ Themes, Mutual Pining, Other, Poetry, Prose Poem, Romantic Soulmates, Slam Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:01:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 4,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27466093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOceanIsMyInkwell/pseuds/TheOceanIsMyInkwell
Summary: I don't know how to say a lot of things because I get tongue-tied when I merely begin to think of telling you. But I think you know the vastness of this something that lives inside me and that lives for you. At least now, in my own quiet way, you can.
Relationships: Reader/Undisclosed
Comments: 7
Kudos: 6





	1. i. honeymoon

**Author's Note:**

> This is a project full of prose poetry culminating my 3-year anniversary with my fiancée. I will continue to update this anthology with more poems through the end of November.

The first month came and went. A torrent of emotions moved me daily so that I was driving to school with a tissue constantly in my hand or the hem of my jacket smeared with my ugly snot. A paradox is what plagued me, the tension between certainty and the unknown. Unlocking my feelings for you had been the first step in a concatenation of many that I could not yet see in my way forward, but I knew without a doubt that forward was where I was headed, so long as I bared my heart to you and you extended your hand to me across the wide and quivering distance.

I did not know if I was a girl. You knew this. In many ways, I felt you were my senior, still plodding day to day in your plaid skirt of sky blue and navy against your necktie perpetually undone, yet knowledgeable about yourself and who you were and who you did not want the world to tell you to be, without anyone there to cheer you on to be yourself. You took my heart with patience and my ignorance of my own gender with confidence. I feared I was going to hurt you, and hurt you forever, the night I decided so soon after we’d gotten together that I loved you. Yet you seized the word from my lips and repeated it back to me, without hesitation, and it was then that I saw the value and the beauty in seeing you love for the first time, because it had never hurt you and so the divine belief in the power of us could override the universal terror of this ending.

I loved you from the day we first spoke. I loved you on the days we played silly pranks on each other. I loved you on the nights we whispered into our headphones under the covers as the city sounds lay winking in sleep around us. I loved you through the tears, through the incoherent calls and voice messages, through the bursts of poetic inspiration and the prizes and defeats, through the nail-biting domination of school in our lives and even through, yes, through, in spite of, the forces that said we would not last.

I love you.

There is no word accurate enough--nor dynamic enough--to describe how I feel about you and what I _am_ when I consider you. 

Year one came and went, and I feared my love would change. As all things do.

And change it did, but not to fade into the edges of my consciousness. Change it did, for softer, for warmer, for better. From the impatient fizzle on the end of a sparker to the glow that rests contentedly in the coals of a well-worn fireplace. From a gangly-legged baby creature, running to and fro and jackhammering inside my chest, to a soft and downy thing that curls in on itself and coos with little bursts of affection at the sight or the remembrance of you.

The second year passed, and though I may not have spoken much to it, it was perhaps the hardest year in my memory of us. As work stole our time and our mental health, a new fear rose up to devour all the old ones and grow stronger than the rest: would we ever have respite enough from our own minds to find each other again? I thought and thought, and stayed awake at night, and thought some more, about what our future holds. I wondered if so many things stacked against two souls could ever be surmountable. I worried that I had infected you with my idealism, and painful as the thing was lodged in my chest, I worried, too, that I was not giving you every bit of what you deserve--and more--from your first love.

I wanted to be your first love. I cherished it, selfishly, and even more so the notion that I could be your last.

But each time we logged on and we talked and talked and talked, I had to marvel at how we clicked back into place like nothing had ever changed at all. I must correct myself that things had changed, for any static is a complete impossibility: but as before, with that flame grown long and tender for you within me, I knew that this change, too, I had to embrace as a new facet of us. That we could be miles apart and time zones away and days upon days without a proper conversation, but the very essence of our souls would always magnetically gravitate to each other.

I think that you and I defy all expectations. We have no honeymoon stage, because your heart and mine move in seamless understanding, and together we embrace the wave of every shift the universe runs under our feet. The carpet we fly on is a tumultuous ride at times, but I’ve learned that the swoop in my stomach does not mean we will fall. You and I are made for more than that. Three years across oceans and universities and grief and a pandemic has more than proved that.

In light of this, I continue my quest for a word to describe how I feel about you that can encompass all the ways we change and grow together. In the meantime, I will settle for beautiful and simple, and entirely inadequate, _I love you_.

And I know without fear, and only longing, that I will love you until we die.


	2. ii. an exercise in intimacy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yesterday the maple leaves by the spot where I park my car were finally leaning from gold to a yearning hue between ginger and tiger. I stopped to pick one up and think about the wonder that might spread first from your mouth to your cheeks and then to your eyes the moment you first saw one of these in your own palm. I thought, too, about boy A and boy B, and thought about how we’ve yet to stare into one another’s eyes for four minutes and let the consequences be damned.

Once I read a story of two boys who fell in love with each other overnight. Well, that’s not quite true, because they loved each other from the start, but the exercise they went through birthed their realizations. Boy A said to boy B, I may be a little drunk, but I read that if you stare into a person’s eyes for four minutes in absolute silence, you’ll fall in love forever.

I’m probably tweaking the wording with my bias for the infinite. It wouldn’t matter, anyhow, because boy A and boy B knew somewhere deep inside them that eternity was written into their names.

They took a sip of wine each and did precisely as boy A had said on a whim. Not really a whim, not even a dare, but there’s no word to precisely mean what boy A said and how he said it, for he himself did not understand until the next morning when boy B beamed up at him through a haze of sleep in his arms underneath the sheets, what truly drove him to come up with this plan.

They gazed into each other’s eyes and blinked, long and sleepy, as the weak light of their one lamp hummed behind the couch on which they sat. And then suddenly neither of them was sleepy anymore, because when you jolt to the realization that you are falling into another realm in someone’s eyes and all the clichés about mazes and galaxies and infinity are true, you cannot go back to the comfortable ignorance and the ignorant comfort of how you were before. And so the pressure to speak muted to nothing. They transcended words, and were filled in part with a small terror in the pit of them, one that could have just as much made them scream in unfathomable joy as had them curled like stone around their knees in stunned silence.

They opened the door to their love that night, and the rest is history. The rest--it is the future.

You know by now what boys I talk about. You and I, we never would have met unless they had, too, a decade and a half ago, much like us: from two poles of what was their entire world.

Yesterday the maple leaves by the spot where I park my car were finally leaning from gold to a yearning hue between ginger and tiger. I stopped to pick one up and think about the wonder that might spread first from your mouth to your cheeks and then to your eyes the moment you first saw one of these in your own palm. I thought, too, about boy A and boy B, and thought about how we’ve yet to stare into one another’s eyes for four minutes and let the consequences be damned.

And I thought, this I thought as well on the heels of that: that if two blind boys could end up soaked in one another’s caresses and gentle breaths at the end of four minutes, then how much more two souls like us, that have crossed the Milky Way to stand with each other?

Perhaps this is all my silly way of telling you that I shouldn’t like to talk so much when we get into the cab from the airport the day I finally bring you home. I’d like to simply take your face between my hands, and pardon please the roughness of my fingers if they’re dry from nervousness, because for years I’ve been deprived of the chance to see the depths of the eyes you see the world with. Please, beloved, I’d like to see the world from your eyes, too. 

And may the second time I fall in love with you be even more thrilling and terrifying than the last.


	3. iii. a jew on a date

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm glad I lived.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in response to "an atheist on a date" by n.n.

In the shadow of comfort that cloaks us, as the flame of your eyes reaches across the table to me from the dimness, I find the strength to breathe with purpose and deliberation. For too long has it been since I lived like this to live: lived like this to draw another breath, because I have found you. It occurs to me that the angel of death passed over me on my eighteenth birthday and I hadn’t wanted to paint my lintel with blood. I find it doesn’t scare me, but I muse on it and run my thumb over the thought in my pocket because had I ceased to want to breathe, I never would have breathed for you.


	4. iv. once a fool

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I've never been happier to be wrong.

A fool once told his son, if you don’t feel the love when you first see her, she ain’t the one for you.

Joke’s on him, because I was never made to be a daughter-in-law anyway. 

I might tell you this, one day, in a small and laughing sort of way, as we lie on the carpet amid the piles of our unpacked boxes and the capiz shell coffee table that we always knew the movers were going to break on the journey. Or I might tell you as I crack the eggs on the edge of the bowl, one-handed, smugly, the way that makes you roll your eyes, and you beat them with that rainbow silicone whisk that clashes with everything else we own.

Or this could be a fleeting feeling that never takes a solid form for articulation. I may never tell you this at all.

Because what matters far more is this.

It is the way you hop on top of the washer lid and wiggle your brows at me as I stare at you over an armful of laundry. It is the way you and the light dancing together feel intimate when I look up and study you from across the studio at your easel. It is the way, too, that you mumble something nonsensical into my ear at three in the morning and burrow deeper into my arms, but I know it’s a happy nothing, and I smile. And it is the way that you rest your hand on top of the gear shift and I wrap my fingers around yours without ever needing to look up to know they’re there.

A fool once told himself he’d never be good enough to find the one. But when I see you-- _god_ , every last time I see you, I know you’re the one for me.


	5. v. body

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What makes you beautiful.

I quite like your teeth. You say you don't. Well, I do.

I like the way your chin comes to a point and the bottom half of your face turns into a triangle when you smile. I like the way your hair stands up three inches from the top of your head no matter which way you part it, and the baby wisps come up at the corners of your temples when everything's pushed back into a bun. I quite enjoy the mystery of how you pile it all atop your crown with a single clip.

Perhaps you haven't noticed and I have the benefit of being a lovesick fool who watches back the videos of you as the snow settles on itself outside the window and the street lights wink in sleep. I notice the way you cross and uncross your legs, and drape your arm across your thigh in a vision of domestic elegance in the mirror. How you blink twice as fast into the unfocused distance just seconds before you open your mouth to sing. The stairwell shivers as you slide into your first note, uncertain but fast and determined and in pursuit. Always, you end on a little laugh. I want to grab it and grab you, and kiss you, on the mouth, with surprising gentleness, to tell you all about the good things that come out of you and tell you to be kind to yourself above all else.

The space in the bed beside me is filled with imaginations of your replies. Filled, too, with the memory of your body, because it is like an ache, not a hurt or a pain but the shadow of a presence that was born there with me at the inception of the universe. My hand seeks the dip in your hips and the expanse of your chest. Your skin, weathered and burnished, soft with hair, sharp with the smell of another corner of the world, ridged. Scarred. Brave. Surviving.

Let me bury myself in you and interlace my hands at the small of your back. Drink your smile and drown in your voice and trace the length of your lashes. Since before time we may have known each other, but with each flutter of the leaves as we round the sun, time runs out for me to know you.


	6. vi. body, too

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I hope you think I'm beautiful, too.

I think that all the times I've tried to die have caught up with me. Somewhere, God heaved a sigh and granted my wish for a body four times as old as my brain. He never granted my wish to be a boy when I was born, to begin with, so I suppose that makes us even. Yet now that we've met, I live on and get up and swing my useless leg over the edge of the bed with the divine spite of a weed that never wants to die.

I apologize, darling, that by thirty I'll be coming to meet you from the cab with a hearing aid and a cane. I'd sweep you off your feet like they do in the old reels, swing you around laughing when we pretend to dance, pick you up and hoist you over the threshold of our new house, let you clamber up onto my back when the fruit is too high to reach over the garden wall. But we'll have to settle for commissioning an artistic stray to capture those dreams on canvas. We could be picturesque and unbothered by the hospital bills.

(Let God laugh at us in our perfect clumsiness. I've heard he's not supposed to make mistakes.)


	7. vii. habit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I don't know how to be, when we can be just you and me.

If anyone asks, I have a respectable list of fears. Windows. Heights. Phobias, even, of elevators and spiral staircases. Choking on melon-flavored hard candy or small, smooth ice cubes. Waking up to find I was an only child all this time. Coming out and never being able to go back in. Discovering I went deaf without saying goodbye to my favorite song.

I go down the list in order of easiest to explain to most embarrassing. But there is one I never speak of, because it slips through my hands before I can lay a name to its taste or form. This is where the art of articulation meets its muteness in my throat.

I’m afraid I don’t know how not to live in fear. You and I, we fancy ourselves some two halves of a phoenix from the ashes of rejection. We shiver from our star-crossed corners of the world in impatience for the dawn when we can run to each other and no one will shackle our arms back.

Dare I? Dare I dream?

Dare I tempt the universe to let me see me without fear?

I lie at night with twin trails of salt drilling into the cotton beneath my head when I think of how little I know to be myself for you. You’d trace the faintest shine of a scar across my chest and I’ll have you gathered in my arms, heart racing out of habit, because this metamorphosis was too good for me to deserve to never be a caterpillar again.

Teach me, lover of my soul. You’ve had more practice at this dreaming business. I’d like to know there’s more to it than mourning the loss of our yearning.

What then shall we do?

How then shall we love, in total freedom?


	8. viii. lens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When we were still two girls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tw for implied dysphoria. Generally a positive message!

I never minded hearing “she” when it was you.

The day I sent the video of me touching myself, you sent back a paragraph, hot and incoherent, with four instances of “she” and one of “girl” and two of the twice debatable, much loved “beautiful.” 

I look back on that with a ready filter to catalog discomfort. I find that there is none. I cannot watch the video back myself because this tedious divorce with my body has taken the better part of a decade. But you were there to ferry me to and fro from the lapping shores of my uneasiness, and I treasure to my chest how beautiful you thought I was in movement before the camera, because no _he_ or _she_ and no _here_ or _there_ and no _anyone_ could cloud how your soul sees mine and we’re just bodies, bodies, borrowing suits to find each other through new eyes after millennia of re-searching for each other.


	9. ix. close to truth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If only she would love us for who we really are.

My mother tells me you’re intelligent. Driven. Funny. A pride. These things she said today, the first time she laid eyes on you and everything that paper tried (and failed) to capture about you. 

I repeated these words back to her with that silent voice in my head, the pain of want stuck fast behind my teeth in the widest grin of my life, yearning, aching to add to them: celestial. Regal. Bold. Sensitive. Kind and beautiful, brave and bright. Hilarious down to the sharpness in my bone.

Tomorrow she will say: you’ve found a sister.

Tomorrow I will want to cry a little over that. How close she is, yet masses of black matter hang between her and the truth.

The day after tomorrow, I will say: I’ve found my beloved. And let the curtain be parted.


	10. x. blue lines

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I confess I have something of a grudge with the post office, darling.

I walked to the mailbox today. Four doors down, twelve squares of cement sidewalk. Some thirty-odd steps to the shelter of the kiosk in the pattering of the rain, my unfit sneakers squelching in the grass where I had to cross the slope where the children usually play. It’s quiet now, and I was the only one standing there in the flickering of the halogen light they still haven’t gotten around to fixing since October.

 _We will, we will rock you, ha ha_ , pours out of the third-floor window across the quad. It sounds irreverent behind the sheets of winter rain in a way that Queen never meant it to be.

I opened the box with the misfit key with the same soft plummet I always get in my stomach when I know there will be nothing inside. I unzipped the secret pocket in the breast of my jacket and pulled out the white envelope with the English address on it, and uncreased it carefully between the pads of my fingers, and slotted it stamp-side first into the Outgoing Mail. I stood there with the absolute knowing that my friend across the Atlantic would get her one-page holiday greeting from me, smelling of burnt pumpkin cinnamon bread and rain and cardboard boxes from my corner of the world. And that she would open it and only have to take one look at the broken loops in my tendonitis-ridden slant to know, _know_ , that I exist.

It’s quite possible I’ve managed to memorize just how you write. I know how you drag the ballpoint at the bottom of your tails in your _g_ ’s and _q_ ’s and _p_ ’s, and there’s a dot of ink that stays there from the insufferable blue pen you always used in 2017 to put your beating heart to lined paper. 

I like to think you know, too, the weight and bend of my hand each time I pen a letter to you. A part of me yearns for you to know this beyond the abstract, when it’s all an impossibility, an illusion defended by the pixels on our camera rolls.

How often have I dropped an envelope in the post knowing full well the universe would open up and swallow it somewhere halfway between me and you?

How long will I open the mailbox with the twin deception of expectation and disappointment?

How many more days, and how much more space of these empty breaths, will I go on without knowing the shape and warmth of your hand?

I don’t give a damn, frankly, about how we write: I wouldn’t give a single one if I had you to touch between my own two hands. Perhaps then we could stand in the freezing rain with somebody’s Queen party raging on the third floor, and pull the crumpled drafts of vows from the pockets of our jeans to read aloud to each other for fun. And the letters could blur together between the wet blue lines, and it wouldn’t matter, because the universe couldn’t swallow us and at last we feel all right.


	11. xi. field of our meeting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I blinked and saw myself and my lover in David and Jonathan as they kissed and wept on the fields of their parting.

The ones with the most tragic love were warriors, darling.

I ought to have been writing someone else last night, but instead I took 1 Samuel in one hand and my Jewish commentary in the other, and I blinked and saw myself and my lover in David and Jonathan as they kissed and wept on the fields of their parting. You have your Achilles and Patroclus, and I: I have two loving warriors of my own.

Warriors we may be, and lovers we know we are, but a part of me wishes never to think again that first thought because thus would our stars be bound to cross.

My boys made a covenant under the eye of God, that gaze that no man understands. They say that Jonathan stood and took off his clothes: armor, scabbard, tunic, sandals, till nothing but skin lay bare to the touch and the breeze. There David stood before him in awe and the heat of blood and battle, and ran his fingertips over the naked shoulders and the lines of his exposure, and kissed him.

I want to take you down to our knees in the field of our meeting. Let us have won the battle before us, or lost it, but let us come out both ends of it alive, with hearts to beat and eyes to meet and lips to devour each other in the covenant of our heat. 

Truly David must have said in his heart, _I love you, more than my life_ , and Jonathan must have replied, _I love you just as I love myself_ , which is to say they could have thrown away all the years ahead of them to save each other. Believe me, other half of my heart, beloved, I would say each of these things and more under my breath and guard them always in silence, for in the quiet of our pact and our nakedness you and I will already know each other till there is nothing left to know.

And even then I would disrobe before you on my knees, over and over, to know you again.


	12. xii. the first time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Someday, we will arrive.

Lately my dreams have been ruled by silent and empty warehouses: the perennial sentinels of my nighttime heart. So I populate my waking thoughts with photographs of things that have yet to pass, blinking in succession with the rapid rise of my yearning.

I’ll be on my knees on the carpet with the plastic bits of my typing keyboard taken apart in my hands, and a q-tip dipped ridiculously in alcohol between two fingers as an aerosol can of glass cleaner balances between my knees. I’ve often wondered what this will look like to you, the first time you see it. Wednesdays are for cleaning technology. Thursday nights are for reordering the clothes in the drawer, rolled a specific way, against the mysterious metric of my thighs. Fridays are for movies and Saturdays are for repenting for the popcorn butter everywhere with a rag and soapy water.

And Sundays--Sundays are for loving.

Do you dream in your waking of me? Do you fish in the surface of the ocean between us for these images of domestic nothing? I rise from bed with my heels braced against the mattress and I start the day, always, with the ridiculous triple crack of my back. Do you know this? Do you let your eyes wander and see this, somehow, past the curtain of the universe?

On the eighth of November, you said, _Let’s tell each other one new thing about ourselves_ , and we did. All the way up to seventy-eight.

And then we stopped, at the urge of life around us, maybe, but more likely for fact that the exercise stole the mystery of knowing each other once we met. We could talk for one thousand one hundred and eighteen days and you could tell me twice as many facts about yourself--and keep them in the archives of my mind I would--but nothing could compete with the way I first see you in the heat of the day and the honk of the crowd, and commit every puzzle pieces of you to memory all over again like it is the first time.

I’ll keep my lucid dreaming for now. But though I say it often, in this regard I am no fool: the holograph of you in my visions of keeping house will dissolve the instant I carry you over the threshold. 

Then we will be real, you and I, _real_ like the breath of the clouded sunrise and the blue jay’s call in the bush and the sting of too much alcohol between my nails and the heat of your lips on my ear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And...that finally wraps up this project. I've never been more paradoxically nervous and confident to post a part of me like this. I've truly found my voice through prose poetry, and hopefully, it's a voice that I never forget again to raise when all my other expressions of love to my special someone feel inadequate.
> 
> my tumblr: theoceanismyinkwell  
> my insta: kc.barrie


End file.
